Free Red Chameleon by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page B

was tired and hungry. The walk to the police station was far and dry, but Porfiry Petrovich did not mind. He had some names to work with. He wanted to hurry back to Moscow, for it was there a survivor existed who might provide a link in the puzzle of the murder of Abraham Savitskaya.

FOUR
    T HE YOUNG MAN AND WOMAN walked along Granovsky Street arm in arm. People who passed them in the late afternoon assumed the man had obtained his flattened nose in some hockey or soccer game. He was burly, rugged looking, and his straight black hair, falling over his forehead, bounced athletically as he moved. He talked easily and loudly. He wore a clean blue short-sleeved shirt that revealed his well-developed biceps and added to his image as an athlete. It was also appropriate that the woman with him was quite beautiful and strikingly blond, her hair worn back in an American-style ponytail. She was not thin like an American, however. She was full and athletic appearing, possibly weighing about 140 pounds and looking as if she had just rolled up her sleeves and stepped out of a poster for increasing production in the steel industry. All she needed was a flag. She wore no makeup and needed none. Health beamed from their faces, and Vera Shepovik glanced at them as she passed, cursed them silently, and wished that she could cross to the park, get out her father’s old rifle, and burn the joy of life from their faces.
    Vera, however, was a half mile away when the couple passed in front of a large apartment building, one of the many on the street that housed the most important and privileged nachalstvo, bosses, in the Soviet Union. A chauffeur-driven car stood in front of one building where Chernenko supposedly lived. The couple paid no attention but whispered something to each other that the driver, pretending to look straight ahead, assumed was sexual. It made the driver shift and wish he could remove the jacket of his semimilitary uniform. It was a hot day, a muggy hot Thursday.
    A jogger, complete with Western sweat suit, flew past the young couple, seriously intent on three or four miles before dinner. His hair was white, and he was lean and fit, an unusual figure on the streets of Moscow. The serious joggers were like this one, head forward, arms low, pace steady. The less serious moved slowly, sometimes almost walking. The jogging suit made it clear, the runner hoped, that he was indeed running and not simply walking.
    As the couple passed a group of men and women arriving home from work, the woman tugged at the sleeve of the young man and pointed at a white Chaika parked in front of an apartment building about four car lengths from the building’s entrance. He seemed at first reluctant to look at the car but then smiled weakly and gave in. Like two honeymooners, they peered through the window and examined the upholstery of the car that the likes of them would never own.
    â€œWell,” said the man in a pebbly voice from a throat planed dry by too much vodka.
    The woman smiled, her pink cheeks a contrast to the broken veins on the man’s hose, visible at close range.
    â€œYes,” she said decisively.
    The street was relatively clear. Cars passed, the sound of traffic rattled past them, and pedestrians ambled forward, carrying cloth shopping bags and briefcases. Standing on the sidewalk, his eyes toward the front of the apartment building, the muscular man, who looked not quite so young at close range, leaned against the car as the woman moved to his side to join him. Behind her back she tried to open the door to the Chaika. It was locked. They talked of this and that and nothing for a few seconds, mentioned a possible picnic in the park, and waited for a break in the crowd. It came, a brief one, and the woman turned, pulling a hollow metal tube of twelve inches or so from her bag. Quickly, without looking back, she leaned forward and thrust the steel tube against the car’s window. Her arms were strong and the